Yesterday's New York Post contained a gossip item in Page Six taken from the book party for James Rosen's The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate in New York, where attendee Tony Danza expressed an interest in playing Richard Nixon aide H.R.

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Here's something random: has anyone ever seen the movie Deadlock (a.k.a. Wedlock), with Rutger Hauer and Mimi Rogers? It was about a futuristic prison where the inmates don electronic collars that are wired to explode when they cross the prison's boundary.

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Almost two full years ago, Russell Crowe was looking to star in the big-screen adaptation of Michael Stanton's The Prince of Providence, which was being helmed by Michael Corrente. Since that time, Crowe is out, the project is still in the works, and as The Hollywood Reporter posts, it might be getting itself a serving of Robin Williams.

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I know some of you are super-jazzed about political content and political film, so how about a good, healthy dose of politics in a science fiction wonderland? In August of last year, producers Gianni Nunnari and Nick Wechsler optioned Warren Ellis' comic mini-series/graphic novel Ocean. Now, The Hollywood Reporter posts that new writer Ryan Condal has been tapped to write the adaptation.

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When it's a regular, run of the mill movie, I don't mind so much if it hits the dust before hitting the screen and the shelves. Sure, it's unfortunate to miss an interesting role, or see what a director had in mind, but there's enough similar fare out there that you can pop in another movie and likely get similar results. However, when the movie is truly strange and piques your interest from the get-go, the thought of never seeing it can be impatiently infuriating.

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So Defamer.com tipped me off to the existence of Hollywood Temp Diaries. I was a bitter temp for many years, a bitter experience which has poisoned my soul forever, leading me to a career of mockery, scoffery, pointless cruelty and the like. So I'm happy to see there is a forum for embittered....

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Adam Sandler's movies haver never represented the apex of cultural awareness, but they do tend to grapple, if somewhat brashly, with the finer points of human relations. In his latest raunchfest, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the insolent comic creates "his stupidest character ever" (as an audience member muttered five minutes.....

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This past weekend kicked off the 12th annual Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival, an event that was to feature master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard as one of its honorary guests. But this morning, it was announced that Godard has backed out due to "circumstances beyond his control." Those circumstances, according to someone close to the filmmaker's office, are related to political pressures brought about by a group called

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Let's talk about Sex, baby ... I got an email from Melissa Silverstein over at Women and Hollywood yesterday, asking a pack of women who work in various aspects of the film industry to share our thoughts on whether a successful box office turn for Sex and the City, which opens this weekend, might herald a change in Hollywood's attitude toward chick-centric movies. Melissa posed the following questions:

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The film isn't as raunchy as its title suggests."

Here, here! The above is the dek for Jam! Showbiz's coverage of the Ottawa screening for Martin Gero's Young People F**king. For those not familiar with the particulars of Canadian politics -- Ottawa is the country's capital, which makes a screening of Gero's film particularly noteworthy when you consider the current and ridiculous political press to deny tax credits to films like Gero's.

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It's been clear for several weeks now that the independent distribution company THINKfilm has been suffering from some money troubles. Around the time the Cannes Film Festival kicked off this month, blogger AJ Schnack assembled reports from various sources that the company owed a lot of money to many different places.

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We just walked in the door after the four-and-a-half hour screening of Steven Soderbergh's Che, one of the most anticipated films at the Cannes Film Festival, and I just had to bang out a quick post to say ... wow. The film is just amazing, in every possible way. I went into it a bit trepidatiously; four-plus hours of guerrilla warfare was either going to be awesome or very, very bad. I walked out feeling like I'd just had the cinematic equivalent of winning the Lotto, and I'm still on a high from the film.

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Thanks to Bourne, the spy-fi genre is alive and well and every studio is on the lookout for a franchise of their own -- even Disney. Variety reports that super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer (along with the Mouse) has purchased the screen rights to David Ignatius' spy thriller, The Increment. Ignatius is an associate editor for The Washington Post and Increment will be his seventh novel. An adaptation of his 2007 book, Body of Lies, has already finished shooting with Ridley Scott at the helm, and Leonardo DiCaprio starring as a CIA agent hot on the tail of a terrorist.

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The horrors of war and the atrocities of which humans are capable of have, of course, been documented extensively in film since the birth of the medium. From the recent slew of documentaries on the Iraq war to Atom Egoyan's controversial 2002 Cannes debut Ararat (about the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman empire); from Schindler's List to The Killing Fields; from The Battle of Algiers to Apocalypse Now; from Ousmane Sembene's last film, Moolaadé (inspired by the genital....

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Bit by bit, we get closer to the soon-to-be-sped-through biopic on George W. Bush, W -- remember, although it hasn't been completely cast, and is just one day into production, it will hit theaters this October. We've got Josh Brolin as Dubya, Elizabeth Banks as Laura, Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer, James Cromwell as George Sr., Ellen Burstyn as Barbara, Thandie Newton as Condoleeza, Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, and Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell.

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